No country wants to be ranked as the top source of hacking attacks, but should the U.S. feel good about falling a few notches in this dubious ranking? Sean Michael Kerner reports.

According to the fourth quarter 2010 State of the Internet report from Akamai, Russia is now the top source of Internet attack traffic in the world.

Akamai found that attack traffic flowing out of Russia represented 10 percent of all observed global attack traffic. In contrast, the U.S accounted for 7.3 percent of attack traffic. The U.S. placed fifth on Akamai's list of attack traffic, dropping from the second spot in the third quarter.

David Belson, Editor of the Akamai State of the Internet report told InternetNews.com that the study specifically looked at port level attacks and is not a measure of spam origination.

"These are things like Conficker trying to spread, port scanning and other exploits that really should have been patched years ago," Belson said. "Some of them are brute force attempts to break into systems via telnet or SSH."

While Akamai sees the attack traffic coming from a specific country, there is the possibility that there is a deeper origination point.